Transcript of The Sleeping Sickness Epidemic (1919-1930)

Hey, weirdos. I'm Ash.

And I'm Elaina.

And this is Morbin.

This is Morbin.

Yeah. Are you correcting me?

Yeah.

Are you correcting me?

Yeah.

It's Morbin.

It's Morvin.

He said, No, it's just fucking Morbin. I'm over Tired today. I know. I can...

Your little off feels.

No, I'm happy. I did so many social things this weekend, and I'm usually not that social of a gal. And I socialed so hard Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday.

You socialed too close to the sun. Yeah.

I didn't feel well when I woke up this morning because my body said, what the fuck were you doing this weekend? It's like, calm down. My body said, lie down. I said, I have to go to work.

I must record. I have I have to. Yeah. I didn't do a crazy amount of socializing.

No. We did your birthday dinner.

And a birthday dinner, a surprise birthday dinner.

John was planning that for weeks, and I worked with you that whole day. And I literally I, as I was leaving, almost went, All right, see you tonight. And then I could have ruined the whole thing. But I didn't.

Because I had no idea because I got sick on my birthday. So it was apparently scheduled for that weekend, but had to be pushed.

It was the day that I forced you to go to urgent care. Yeah. And I was like, guess we're not going to dinner tonight. Because you're going to urgent care. Exactly. You will be at urgent care, probably for a while.

But yeah, so that was great.

It was really sweet. John had this whole menu put together. Yeah. And he wrote, witches never age. Yeah. He's such a sweetie. And Elaina thought, I did that. I said, I didn't even do that.

I did. And then John was like, no, I did.

I said, I just texted a few people and said, can you make it? Can you make it? Can you come?

Since we've had to change it a hundred times. Yeah. No, it was great. It was wonderful. It was exactly what I wanted.

I'm glad.

My favorite restaurant. With your favorite people. With my favorite people. Most of them. Yeah, with some of my favorite people, I will say. Yeah. But, yeah. So, I think I'm 2026. I'm liking it. It feels like a time.

I'm loving it so far. I'm loving it, 2026.

I'm just trying to have... Oh, I have a hack for all of you.

Tell me. Have you said this to me yet?

I have not. So I wanted this is a hack for everybody in the room and listening because I've tried it. I wanted to try it a few times to see if it actually made a difference. So I've been trying to slowly wake up earlier because you fall out of it during the holidays and all that shit. Everything gets all fucked up. I'm fully out of it. So I've been trying to wake up even earlier because I like to wake up before the house wakes up so I can have my quiet time, get some shit done. And now when I wake up, I got myself I got it on Amazon. It's just like a Bluetooth speaker that looks like an old timey radio. And I play slow Gatsby-esque jazz in the morning while I make my coffee, while I open the shade Rides.

Listen to you.

While I get stuff ready for breakfast, I play slow Gatsby-esque jazz. I made a playlist.

I don't do that in the morning. I do that at night when I cook dinner.

See, I recommend it for a lot It's like your lifetime.

Yeah. I love it for dinner because it's like your day is slowing down, you're unwinding. It romanticizes your dinner making.

That is exactly what I was going to say. So I started doing that and it What a nice way to wake up. It's nice, yeah. Because you're not listening to someone talk at you. I love a podcast. I love it. I do, too. But sometimes when I first wake up, I need a moment before any voices are really telling me things. Yeah. And so this is like no voices until they start singing about some love or something. There you go. But it's like, it just eases you into the day and it makes it feel a little more like special and romanticized. That's great. Waking up. Like when you open the shades and everything, you feel like you're making your coffee. It's a little more of an event. Yeah. And when you, I'm telling you, get an old timey radio looking Bluetooth speaker. Then you're really in it. And that shit will change your life because you put it in the kitchen. So when you turn it on, it feels like it's coming out of an old-timey radio and you just feel like you're transported.

It feels like the '50s, but you can have a credit card.

And also if you're meal planning or you're cooking dinner, you're getting lunches ready for the kids, put on some slow, old-timey jazz. I'm telling you, it'll romanticize the moment.

And I even pour whatever I'm drinking into a pretty glass.

Yes, me too.

Because that, especially when I'm cooking dinner. Use the pretty glasses. Use the pretty glasses.

Yeah. One thing I'm doing this year that I've been seeing everywhere, and I'll even I'll post my my playlist that I made for a little slow time because I was very serious about the ones that I picked because I didn't want any outliers here.

I wanted- Strictly the best.

Slow, old-timey Gatsby S jazz.

What did you name the playlist?

I think I literally- Slow, old-timey Gatsby S jazz.

Let me get it.

I'm going to see what I named it because I'll put it up on Instagram for anybody who feels like they...

Elina's Wreck.

It's called Morning Soft Gatsby Jazz.

Oh, bitch. Love it. It hits a little harder.

It does. It does. And it's only got a few songs on it, but that's enough. Because it's just for little things that you're doing.

It's just for the morning.

Use the fancy glass. Wear the fancy thing. Because what if you're dead tomorrow? You could. You didn't wear the fancy thing.

You could literally die tomorrow.

Don't save shit. What are you saving it for? For what? Don't save it. Every day is a fucking event, all right? You're alive. We live in a hellscape. Every day is a goddamn event that you get excited for. So let's make everything romantic and a big deal.

And hot.

It really does change things. When you- It changes your attitude. Romantic side of thing, little moments. If you can bring yourself to slowly do it, I promise you it'll make a difference. Yeah, it does. And you don't have to do anything crazy.

Just little things. Do you know what I've been doing? I'm a night time shower girly most of the time. Well, sometimes I do the morning, but lately I've just been doing it at night. And I turn off all the lights lately and I put in my candle warmer and I play spa music.

And that is a nice way to end your night. Honestly, yeah.

Because you go from the soft jazz, soft nighttime jazz of dinner with your fancy drink. And then you get into the shower and you're spying. And actually my aura ring has told me, whatever the fuck you're doing, keep it up. Really? Yeah. Because it's like my heart rate is better at night or something. Shit. They're like, did you do something before bed last night to optimize your sleep?

What's going on?

Yeah. I'm like, killing it.

Yeah. So see?

Little tips. Yeah. That's how you should do your day.

Because I think everybody needs little tips right now on how to be happy and fancy-free.

Like ease into the new year.

And I'm trying. So I'm going to share whatever works for me.

We're out here.

But yeah. So that's my thing. Cool. But, speaking of Gatsby S. Jazz, we're going to be in the early 1900s. There you go. During this. Perfect.

From Gatsby S.

Jazz to an epidemic.

Great.

This is an interesting one. This is a little different. Okay. It's not true crime, but it's interesting history and bizarre history, and it's got a mystery with it. I love history. History, you know?

Listening you over there, romanticizing your topics.

That's right. I think this one's really... This one fascinated me because this particular illness, it was once called the Sleeping Sickness. It has a lot of wild symptoms that come along with it. I'll mention at some point, one of it is just a really legion here. One of the symptoms that would happen is you would go catatonic and then your face would freeze in a look of horror. Oh, my God. And just freeze. And you couldn't... It was like the how they look like, your face would just be stuck that way.

Or Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets. Yes. Yeah.

That was real.

Damn. Yeah.

So let's get into it. Tell me everything. Let's get into it. I think this was also called in We'll mention it again. It was called Different Things when it first came up because people didn't know what the fuck this was and still don't really understand what it was or is. And at one point, I think it was called the Grandmother, the Nona, because it was- That's it.

Just the grandmother.

Because it was like a sleeping disease. It's so crazy.

She's been stricken with the grandmother. With the grandmother. She has the Nona.

The Nona. Let's begin in 1916, shall we? Let's do it. So there was a war was raging across Europe, and Dr. Constantine von O'Conomo. Him? Yeah, another von.

Love a von.

Got some vons.

Do I love this von?

He had become pretty used to treating men with a variety of maladies at his psychiatric clinic at the University of Vienna. It was a pretty normal thing at this point because there was a war raging. The war really ushered in a new era of technological advances in weaponry. And these weapons that were now advancing so far were capable of causing mass destruction and also leaving witnesses to that destruction super psychologically damaged in their wake. There was a whole new host of issues that people were dealing with. As a result, Von O'Kahneman and medical professionals like him really came to know and recognize the symptoms of delirium, shell shock, PTSD. These were all very common in soldiers that they were seeing. Several years into the war, Dr. Von O'Kahneman had become accustomed to seeing all manner of not just psychological illnesses, but injuries, like physical injuries. They were coming from the horrific effects of mustard gas, of chlorine gas, disfiguring damage from artillery shells. It was really bad. But the cases that really interested him the most were the epidemic illnesses like typhus, cholera, influenza, because there weren't just physical dangers of battle or psychological dangers.

The conditions on the actual battlefield, like the cold, the wet, the dirty. The wet. The conditions of the soldiers themselves being malnourished, highly stressed, mostly injured, dealing with all this shit. It was ideal for contracting and spreading a lot of infectious diseases.

Makes sense.

Though these illnesses weren't as obvious, they were definitely not less devastating among the soldiers, and they spread like wild fire.

Because they're in such close quarters.

Oh, yeah. They're on top of each other, and they're all just being switched out all the time. The entire wings of hospitals would be dedicated to their treatment at times. Now, we're talking today about a disease that's called Encephalitis lethargica. Okay. It's unknown where it first appeared. The epidemic of the early 20th century is thought to have started in 1915 Romania, but more recent studies of this disease have thought that maybe something called the English sweats, it was referred to, might have been similar to this. And maybe that was the first thought of it, like sight of it or whatever. But it's really hard to pinpoint because as we'll come to see during this, this has so many varying symptoms, and they're so weird. They're strange symptoms, and it doesn't hit two people the same way. It's very strange.

It sounds like COVID.

It is. It's really scary. Now, the first documented cases of the disease appeared in 1916 at Von Oecanimo's Clinic in Vienna and at the Paris clinic of Dr. René Cruchet. At Cruchet's clinic, men started arriving from the front lines with just a variety of symptoms that they were easily identifiable, but they didn't really comprise together a single diagnosis. Okay. By themselves, you could be like, Okay, that's that. But altogether, it was like, What the fuck is this? According to author Molly Caldwell-Crosby, quote, Some had fever, others did not. Most complained of headache and nausea. Strangest of all was how much these soldiers slept. Now, it makes sense that a person who gets the flu or a flu-like thing, as these guys were, would probably want to and need to sleep for longer periods than someone who's healthy. But there was something like very unnerving about these particular patients, not just the amount of time that they were sleeping, but also the way that they looked. Crosby said it would have seemed almost serene at first. Their blank, expressionless faces, free of terror and pain. But over time, they would fall asleep and stay that way days or sometimes weeks.

What the fuck? Then sometimes they would never wake up. Oh. Yeah. Now, in Vienna, Dr. Von O'Kahnema was seeing a similar strange combination of symptoms in his own patients that were coming from the front line. Like soldiers. In January 1917, a man arrived at the clinic complaining of exhaustion, confusion, and headaches. He sat in front of the doctor, and he said that he was like, as he sat in front of him, he was struggling not just to stay upright, but just to stay awake. He couldn't even stay awake to sit and talk to him. He slumped in his chair. His head was like, lolling around from side to side. And he numerous times completely nodded off while he was talking to the doctor. He He said every time the man fell asleep, Von O'Kahneman could rouse him, but never to full consciousness. He said he was more like someone who had been woken from a deep sleep and is only vaguely aware that they're no longer sleeping. Oh, that's weird. And by that point, Von O'Kahneman had this type of exhaustion in a small number of patients who, again, had come from the front lines of war.

But this person was a civilian. Oh. So now he's like, wait.

Now we're spreading. Yeah.

So the early cases documented by Von O'Kahneman and Cruchet were baffling both of them. This illness seemed to have similarities to influenza, which was very rampant at the time, but it lacked a lot of the defining characteristics of flu. And more strange was the fact fact that among the small number of people who did present with encephalitis lethargica, there was, again, just the widest variety of symptoms. The best Von O'Kahneman could tell was that they appeared to be suffering from encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain tissue. But there was no explanation for that swelling. There was no evidence of head trauma, no other injury that could really account for it. Also, while some of the symptoms matched a typical case of encephalitis, which is fever, headaches, confusion, there were others that were not associated with encephalitis at all.

We heard. Yeah.

So as the weeks go by, Von O'Kahneman started noticing new symptoms in his patients, including one epidemic of hiccuping that resulted in one death. Wait. They hiccuped themselves to death? Yes, you heard that correct. An epidemic of hiccuping where one person died.

What the fuck?

Yeah.

They died of hiccuping. Yeah.

Which sounds like the worst death imaginable. Yeah. Think of how awful it is when you start getting the hiccups and you're like, Oh my God, make it stop. You get one hiccup and you're like, Fuck, get it gone. I'm like, Give me, honey. Someone, scare me. I'm holding my breath. Holy shit. That's awful.

Yeah, it's the worst.

When then other patients started exhibiting even stranger symptoms, like compulsive verbal tics, uncontrollable blinking, involuntary muscle twitching, uncontrolled salivation, and a small number of people who, quote, froze still in a catatonic state. It was like the disease was developing new symptoms as it progressed, but with no explanation whatsoever. And while these patients had a lot of symptoms in common, the only symptom shared by all of them was hypersomnia. Okay. So other than that, it was like they all had hypersomnia, the rest of them- With a whole skew of different things. But then they had a ton of shit that was just outside of that. Now, in time, Von O'Cahnamon and Cruchet, who still had not compared notes at this point, because they're in two different places, they recognized a pattern in the clinical presentation of encephalitis witharctica. Like the more common form of encephalitis, the disease affected patients in two phases. It was acute and a chronic phase. The acute phase, that had dramatic symptoms like excessive sleep, eye twitching, movement disorders. Those common symptoms, though, were often accompanied by less common symptoms. And these less common symptoms almost felt like they came and went day to day.

Like they appeared one day and went the other. For obvious reasons, the chronic phase of the disease took a lot longer to identify and could present months or even years later. And they would sometimes present in the form of Parkinsonian-like signs. Oh. Yeah. So at their respective clinics, both doctors are just diving and pouring into medical literature, just trying to find anything that could figure out because they're also having trouble treating these people, too. Just finding anything that resembled what they were seeing, first in soldiers returning from the front lines and then in civilians. But Von Oeconoma recalled hearing stories of a similar plague that had affected parts of Italy in the late 19th century. According to the stories, apparently, peasants in a small village in rural Italy started falling into coma-like sleep, and a lot of them never woke up. And those who did wake up were not the same as they were from before. These people called the disease La Nona, the grandmother. La Nona. La Nona.

But I don't think I'll ever be over a disease being called the grandmother.

The grandmother.

That sounds like a horror The grandmother.

The grandma. But in the surrounding towns and villages, those who had symptoms were referred to as the living dead. Yeah. According to Crosby, this was the first time that doctors had considered whether the strange sleeping sickness could be related to the outbreak of influenza that was occurring at the time. Okay. Now, based on those theories, Von Oecanimo started developing his own theory that these strange symptoms he was seeing in his encephalitis lethargica patients could maybe be a reaction to exposure to influenza. In April 1917, he gathered all his notes and observation and published a manuscript appropriately titled Encephalitis Lethargica. Coincidentally, and this is a total coincidence, Just a few days later, René Cruchet published his own paper on the case in Paris. That's weird. They were both on the case. These two manuscripts were the first to formally identify the disease. But in the decade or so after that, roughly 9,000 papers on the subject would be published in various places, all theorizing what could be the cause, but absolutely no one being able to figure out the cure, the treatment, or really nailing down the cause. Okay. Yeah. Despite the horrific toll that this is taking on the patients, the encephalitis lethargica, is taking on a patient's brain and body, it would eventually lead to some pretty ground-baking discoveries about the function of the brain in general.

That's really cool. Because remember, we're in the early 1900s. So though he couldn't examine the brains of his patients directly, at least not while they're alive. Yeah. Von Oecanimo theorized that patients with encephalitis lethargica had been infected with some virus that only affected one part of the brain. Okay. As a result, he would eventually establish that the affected region, the hypothalamus, was responsible because we didn't know what the parts of the brain were responsible for at this point. But he was able to go backwards and figure out that the hypothalamus is responsible for, among other things, regulating sleep, body temperature, thirst, and hunger, and so on.

So boom, that's- Groundbreaking. Yeah, that's big.

While this is now considered pretty basic information in neurology, at least, it was a really remarkable discovery in this day. And more importantly, at least for Von Oecanimo and the other doctors studying this disease, it narrowed down the affected area and helped them to rule out other illnesses and potential causes of mystery illnesses. The problem, though, is that by the end of the decade, encephalitis lethargica was no longer just affecting soldiers returning from war, but even more alarming was the fact that cases were popping up outside of Paris and Vienna now. The disease was spreading faster than they expected, and They had no way of stopping it or even slowing it down because they didn't know what the fuck it was. Right.

So what do you like? What proportions do you even put into place?

So as the war raged across Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa, troops continued being moved in and out of those regions by the thousands. As men were injured or killed, they would be removed from battle and replaced with healthy soldiers, and the war would continue. Now, in the context of a battle, that's obviously a necessity. But it never occurred to anyone in charge that by moving so many people in and out of these places, they were creating the perfect environment for this virus to spread. Now, just as the first patient showed up at the Von O'Cahnomo and Crochet Clinics after being taken off the front lines, other soldiers were cycled off the battlefield and sent to hospitals and clinics in their respective home countries. When the war ended in November 1918, the vast majority who survived were shipped home, bringing with them the germs that they picked up while serving.

Oh, man. And it was probably just popping off all over those ships.

Now, between 1917 and 1930, nearly 1 million people contracted encephalitis lethargica. And of those, roughly half died as a result of their symptoms. Jesus. Now, those numbers are small relative to other pandemics and epidemics. But for a remarkably bizarre and mysterious illness, it's pretty surprising that encephalitis lethargica, the epidemic, has never really had a bit... It's like a footnote in medical history. It's crazy.

At the same time, it was probably hard to diagnose, too. So who really knows how many people did die of that?

We just didn't know. Exactly. Now, one reason for that status is the fact that among the germs passed around the world following the end of World War I was the Spanish flu. A virus that raged for more than two years and killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. As Molly Caldwell-Crosby said, in Europe and elsewhere, few people worried about the little known epidemic of sleep. They were preoccupied with the rapidly spreading, extremely virulent influence of breaking out among troops in Europe and the United States, which makes sense. Yeah, it does. Now, by 1918, encephalitis lethargica had made its way to England, where it proved just as perplexing and unable to be defined as it had been when it first appeared in France and Italy. Among the first cases reported came from physician Dr. Ajay Hall, who by that time had already heard of this disease. What struck Hall as unusual was that his patient, who was a young boy, did not seem really exhausted or even sleepy, but he was experiencing a level of muscle weakness that left him unable to lift an arm or leg off the bed. Damn. Yeah.

That's intense.

So his body was tired. Yeah. This was similar to the first civilian to visit Von O'Conomo's clinic who was unable to hold himself up in the chair and keep his head up for any period of time. Now, soon, other cases of encephalitis lethargica started showing up at Hall's clinic, and they arrived with symptoms of the flu, which was rampant at the time. But then a short time later, the symptoms would progress, and that's when we'd see all the strange encephalitis lethargica symptoms. All suffered from profound lethargy and hypersomnia. Emia, which appeared to affect most patients more severely during the day. Crosby wrote, It was as if their sleep cycle was turned around. They stayed in the sleepy stupor all day and became delirious at night. And by that time, one or more common symptom seen in patients in the UK was a tendency to mumble or ramble incoherently like they were talking in their sleep.

That's so spooky.

It's the spookiest illness.

I don't like that.

As the numbers of infected growing, more unnerving symptoms started coming out, too. Patients would fall asleep with their eyes wide open.

No, shut the fuck up.

Wide open, unmoving, staring blankly into the distance. No. Others got facial hypertonia, a type of muscle rigidity that left their faces twisted and fixed in a mask-like expression of horror. Eew. Yeah. There were other extreme, though much less common symptoms, seem in patients as more cases kept popping up. In Hall's clinic, many patients who would be in a stuper-like state during the day would come out of that state in the evening and be in a state of euphoria, causing them to talk incessantly or rise around in their beds.

What the fuck? Like, what? Makes you think of Nancy at the end of the Craft.

Yes, that's immediately what I thought of. It gave me the gift. In one case, a young boy was described as, Leaping from all fours into the air like the mechanical toys sold on the London streets called Jump Beatles.

What?

Yeah.

He said, I feel better. Yeah.

He would just jump at night. He would jump around on all fours.

That's literally you when you feel like a millisecond better and the doctors are like, No, you still are sick. No, lay down. Lay down. Get it together.

That's true. Now, for some, the exhaustion rendered them unaware of their more physical symptoms because they were so tired they couldn't really experience any of the other symptoms.

Well, they just weren't with it. Yeah.

For others, like the boy leaping from all fours, the symptoms were terrifying, to say the very least. Worse than the presentation of the symptoms was the fact that doctors who encountered the disease in their patients couldn't do really shit for them.

Yeah, well, because they just don't know what to treat.

Yeah. By the end of 1918, the first year the disease appeared in England, there were more than 500 cases. In the months that followed, the number doubled. In January 1919, towns and cities across England started posting notices in the papers informing residents that one or more cases had been documented in their in Syria, and urging anyone with symptoms to report their case.

They said, lay low, motherfuckers.

One notice said, In view of the serious nature of the disease and the difficulties attending their treatment and presentation, it is highly important that notice be sent to the medical officer of health in every case without delay. Now, in the early months of 1919, as British physicians were just grappling with this mysterious illness, cases of this illness began appearing in the United States. In New York, several cases appeared in large clusters and among groups with social connections, giving doctors the first clue that whatever was causing this, it appeared to be spread through close contact. In response, they began investigating the commonalities among the affected individuals, including their living conditions, shared food, water sources, and any kinship relations between those showing symptoms. Now, among the first patients documented in that phase was a 16-year-old girl identified as Ruth. That winter, she was brought to the Manhattan Clinic of Dr. Frederick Tillny, one of the city's most well-known neurologists. When Tillney was first informed of this new patient, all he was told was that she had fallen asleep and wouldn't wake up. Jesus. By that time, Tillney had already read the medical literature coming from the doctors in Europe and believed he had already seen a few mild cases of sleeping sickness.

So when Ruth's parents described her symptoms, he was like, She got encephalitis lethargyga.

He says she has the grandma.

The grandma.

The nona.

The Nona. According to Ruth's parents, she had returned home from work one afternoon, about a week after Christmas, and began complaining, and this is the strangest beginning to this, she started complaining of a sharp pain in one of her fingers. Rindem. That had come on suddenly. What? Within hours, the pain had spread up her arm and into her shoulder, causing numbness that would eventually lead to paralysis.

Eew.

By the next day, Ruth had become irrationally fearful and started lashing out violently at her parents. Oh, my God. She would nash her teeth and thrash wildly. The fuck? She's 16.

Yeah.

To the point that she had to be sedated and restrained. She was like a wild animal, they said. Thank God. A short time later, she fell asleep and could not be roused. By the time Dr. Tillney was called, she had been asleep for two months.

Why did it take so long to call Dr. Tillney?

Because I guess she was at a different hospital. She had a feeding tube and an IV drip to keep her I'm nourished. Two months? Two months. Sleeping.

Damn. Back to that finger thing. It's actually like, that's crazy. That's how my COVID started. The first... I've only had it once.

Your finger hurt?

No, it's similar, though. My elbow was like, and it's like joint pain. But my elbow was so sore. And I remember saying to Drew, I was like, oh, my God, my elbow is so sore right now.

That's so bizarre.

And then the rest of my body started hurting. And I was like, do I have COVID? Oh, that's wicked bizarre. But it started in my elbow. Wow. Isn't that weird? That is weird. When I looked it up, it was like, yeah, joint pain. It makes sense. But it was one specific elbow.

But it's just like the elbow hurts. Yeah, it was weird. Ruth was like, my finger hurts. Yeah.

I mean, the finger is even stranger. That's crazy. Yeah.

So among the things that puzzled Tillny the most was the fact that although she appeared to be asleep, this is even weirder, she was able to respond to simple commands.

Well, that's when we were talking about comas recently. Yeah. How we don't have a lot of understanding about it. Yeah.

But She was like someone in a trance, he said. Like her eyes and mouth were closed, but she was able to respond to simple prompts from the doctor. When Tylne asked Ruth to shift her body from one side of the bed to the other, she did it. So she could still heal. With difficulty, but she did it. Okay. By that time, she had developed the additional symptom of hypertonia, which caused the muscles in her arms and legs to become rigid and stuck in what was surely uncomfortable positions for hours. I was just going to say that must be so painful. Yeah, and just Yeah. According to Crosby, when Tillie tried to move her from the bed, she began to tremble. It started with a hand or arm and then spread until her entire body was convulsing in a rabbit-like twitch. Oh, my God. Like so many other doctors around the world, Tillny had come to recognize the symptoms of encephalitis lethargica, the Nona. The grandma. But was that a loss for how to treat it? That's the worst part of it. Yeah, well, you do. In the end, his recommendations were just basically ways to make Ruth more physically comfortable.

Yeah, that It makes sense.

But he was forced to tell her parents that as of that time, there was no treatment or cure and that their daughter was likely to stay in that state. Forever? In fact, a few days later, Ruth's temperature spiked to 107 degrees, and she died.

Oh, my God. That's awful.

What a horrific.

After months of living that way. Just horror. Yeah, that's so sad.

So as cases began spreading in the US, so did anxiety and fear now about this disease. The Spanish flu epidemic had affected millions of people around the US and the world, killing massive numbers of people. But influenza was something people could at least understand. They could recognize influenza. You know what a flu is. And also the most devastating effects of the flu affected certain populations, which made it less intimidating to the general public. Encephalitis lethargica, on the other hand, was something fucking terrifying.

Yeah, it seems like anybody could get it.

And totally weird and bizarre and scary and horrific. Yeah. Not only were the symptoms varied across patients, but they were psychologically disturbing, physically disabling, and seemingly impossible to treat. Even if one did manage to survive the acute phase of illness, the chronic phase brought with it Parkinson's-like symptoms that would be profoundly life-altering at that point. Yeah, which is so scary. People lived with this forever. Wow. While new cases started popping up around the US with a lot of frequency now, the American public looked to doctors and health care workers to explain this scary disease that seemed to come out of fucking nowhere. But by that point, the predominant theory was that encephalitis lethargica was somehow related to the flu epidemic that had recently gone crazy.

Almost like a mutated flu?

Yeah, just like a pop off of it. You know what I mean? A pop-off. A quick pop-up store.

It's the flu popping off. It's the flu.

It's like a pop up version of the flu. Since so many of the symptoms, particularly the early ones, were seen in cases of the flu, you would come in with flu-like symptoms. Right. And encephalitis was caused by an infection, it seemed reasonable to presume that the sleeping sickness was an after-effect of the Spanish flu. Similarly, just a few years earlier, an epidemic of malaria had spread across the African continent, sharing several of the more prominent symptoms seen in patients with encephalitis letharga. As a result, some doctors theorized that the newly-emerged disease could be related.

I mean, yeah, I could see why they would think that. Yeah.

By early spring, administrators in cities across the US were forced to address this growing fear. They had to talk to the public. They couldn't just let them be like, oh.

Because it's like, what do you do? What precautions do you take?

But the worst part is they have no fucking information. They didn't have a lot to say. They have very little information.

There's this episode of Spongebob where he just is not going to go outside, and he sings this song where he's like, indoors, indoors.

That's basically what they were doing. That would be me.

They're just door to door. Stay inside. Indoor, Now, in San Francisco, the city's Health Department released a statement in early March, 1919, saying, San Francisco need have no fear of the sleeping sickness. Don't you lie to me like that.

As an aftermath of the influenza. It is well established that the sleeping sickness is carried by the a Tetsy fly, and occasionally by other insects found in Africa and the South. It has no direct connection with the influenza, which is entirely different origin.

That's a bitch made statement.

That's a very bitch made statement. It would turn out that San Francisco health officials were wrong on literally every point that they put in that.

Also, what's a Tetsy fly?

It's like a little... I think it's almost like a mosquito. Tetsy fly. Just four days later, physicians in the city started reporting their first cases of encephalitis letharga. So they were to San Francisco Health Officials were like, it's, no, don't worry. No Tetsy flies here. Get out of here. No. And then four days later, they were like, so my bad.

Does that sound familiar Is that clear to anyone?

No, it sounds totally foreign. I can imagine.

It's almost like we were told the same thing.

It's almost like that. In one case, a local railroad worker, Chester Jones, came down with symptoms and slept for 10 days straight.

Not Chester.

Just Chester.

Honestly, he probably loved that 10 days of sleep if that was it, because a railroad worker, that's- That's a hard job.

Yeah. During that period, Jones' doctor, W. B. Coffee, was able to rouse him long enough to eat a small amount of food or drink water. But otherwise, he was out.

Damn.

And this isn't like a coma. That's the thing. It's like, they are sleeping. Because they can wake them up and be like, here, have a piece of toast. And then they're like, all right, good night. Back to sleep.

It's crazy. I wonder if they were able to get up to use the bathroom or what the vibe was.

Yeah. Now, coffee said, We have had both hiccups and the sleeping sickness among the various other effects of the influence. Not the hiccups. So hiccups are back. This form of sleeping sickness is to be distinguished from that which is carried by the Tetsyfly and is found in the tropic. So he's like, Liens.

Yeah. It's not the same. You guys fucked up.

Meanwhile, in New York, the first deaths from sleeping sickness were reported. Started, starting with steamship Captain Frank Martin, who had been diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica just five days earlier. The rising number of deaths inspired way more fear in the public, obviously. But state and local health officials were trying to minimize the danger of it. The New York Health Commissioner told reporters, The symptoms of the disease are much the same as those of spring fever. Disagree. Lying sacs of shit. Are you all right? I'm sorry. That's insane to do.

Are you just trying to piss everyone off?

I love this. But just because a man feels languid, he need not jump to the conclusion he has contracted sleeping sickness.

I would jump to that conclusion.

If I felt languid, I feel like I have a sleeping sickness. Being languid feels a little more intense than feeling just a little sleepy. Yeah. The fuck? Now, the willingness to disregard the dangers of encephalitis lethargica was not limited to the US. In Montreal, so Canada, you are not immune to this.

You are usually on the right side of history.

We usually were Rooting for you. We're all rooting for you. I've never in my life yelled at a girl like this. That's right. But in Montreal, health care workers simply took... They took a very dismissive approach to it. Obviously, it was in an effort to quell public fear.

Yeah, they don't need mass pandemon.

They didn't know enough about how to properly inform without inciting.

They didn't know a lot about truth-telling back then.

It happens. One hospital worker told a reporter, this reluctance to diagnose encephalitis lethargica does not discredit the Montreal all physicians in any way. To determine absolutely that a patient was suffering from a new disease is extremely difficult. And in every case so far, there has been an element of doubt. Well, that's fair. So they're being much more like, I would say, diplomatic about it. They're being like, maybe it's not because we don't want to, it's because it's hard to diagnose a new disease.

Yeah, I got that. And you don't want to say something as that and then be completely wrong.

Have it not been that. By 1921, doctors had still not discovered a solution for this or what it was, but they were managing to at least make some headway in starting to understand it better. Not only were they continuing to narrow down the areas of the brain affected by encephalitis lethargica, but they were also starting to recognize earlier cases that had been diagnosed as something else because they didn't understand this disease before. In Los Angeles, for example, one doctor described having been referred a patient from, The leading Alienist in Los Angeles. I love when they were called Alienists. After the young woman had been diagnosed with catatonia.

Okay.

He said, I was called in after three of the physicians, along with their mental specialists, had tried every blood test and every means of diagnosing the condition for a week. In retrospect, the doctor recalled the woman had influenza not long before the new symptoms came, which further supported the suspected link between the two. Right. Now, over the course of the 1920s, physicians and specialists kept trying to nail this shit down. In 1923, for example, a study out of Europe found that out of a thousand encephalitis lethargica patients evaluated, only four had a history of influenza within the previous six months, of which two were doubtful.

So that's not it.

Yeah. So similarly, in a much larger study conducted at Camp Dix in New Jersey, 6000 cases of influenza were studied and no concurrent cases of encephalitis lethargica were identified. Wow. So it seemed to bash that link in the head. Definitely. Further complicating matters was the fact that not all patients experienced the same symptoms, nor were they affected in the same ways and for the same length of time. There was no consistency. For instance, a middle-aged man in New York might fall into a coma and die from a fever a week later, which literally happened, while a teenage girl in London would experience delirium and hypersomnia that lasted for a then went away miraculously. And there was hardly ever a clue why. What started it, right? In 1936, Joseph Langen Jr, a 30-year-old Illinois man, woke from an encephalitis lethargica coma after 440 days.

Oh, my God.

Shocking everyone around him.

Just a year of your life gone, over a year of your life gone.

Just woke up. 440 days.

He said, All right, let's do this.

Yeah, he said, I feel rested.

So let's go. I I wonder if he had any after effects. Yeah.

That's the thing.

A lot of them did. Like, lingering symptoms.

A lot of them did. And most of the people around him thought he would succumb to what they were calling the sleep of death at this point. Yeah. Now, perhaps one of the most baffling things about encephalitis lethargica epidemic was that after more than a decade of crazy bizarre symptoms and a lot of tragic outcomes, the disease just seemed to disappear.

Which is so strange because it's like there weren't a lot of precautions put into place because they didn't know what precautions put into place.

Exactly. Where did it go? According to Dr. R. R. Dormashkin, by 1927, the acute cases occurring in England were often so mild that the acute phase would pass without much notice. But the long long term effects could often be quite devastating, leaving a lot of individuals in comas for the rest of their lives.

That's awful.

While new cases of encephalitis lethargica began slowing as early as the later 1920s, and they were considered exceptionally rare by 1930s, those who neither died nor recovered from the illness were left in a vegetative state for the rest of their... They just didn't really come out of it. Even if they came out of the coma, they would be forever changed. Yeah, I mean, of course. And those who did survive were left with what neurologist Oliver Sacks described as extraordinary crises. That could include the, quote, simultaneous, virtually instantaneous onset of Parkinsonism, Catatonia, ticks, obsessions, and 30 or 40 other problems sometimes. Oh, my God.

It's like so it literally robbed your life.

You survived it, but you really don't. Yeah. Like, do you? In the aftermath of this epidemic, most doctors were content to accept the theory that it was related to influenza or just allowed the disease to be a mystery. They were like, whatever. We don't know.

We don't know. Moving on. It doesn't happen again.

Decades after the epidemic had ended, Sacks' focus was on treating those locked in the comas still by this disease in the first place. Beginning in the late 1960s, Sacks started working with encephalitis lethargica coma or catatonic patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. In his experiments with the amino acid LDopa, Sacks found that many of the patients suffering with the severe Parkinson's-like symptoms of encephalitis lethargica, including muscle rigidity, spasms, and tremors, could find relief, incredible relief. Really? Although the success of LDopa proved limited and temporary at the time, ongoing research in the years since has resulted into continuing success with treating people who have dealt with these long-term symptoms. In 2002, the last known survivor of the encephalitis lethargic epidemic, Philip Leather, died in London at the age of 82. Wow. He was once a child prodigy. He had incredible promise, and he contracted the illness in 1931 while he was still a child. And he spent seven decades in what the press described as a, quote, translike state. Seven decades. Seventy years? Seventy years. They said he just slowly went into himself over a period of a few years. That's what his sister, Jean, said.

Now, after his death, his brain was donated to the Royal London Hospital, where a lot of specialists were hoping it was going to just completely unlock all the secrets of the disease. But unfortunately, it didn't really shed any light.

Nothing?

Which is like wild. That there was no hallmark thing that you could point to to say this is what happened. As of today, cases occasionally pop up from time to time.

Shut the fuck up. Don't even tell me that.

But they're super rare, exceedingly rare. They better be. As for the cause of this sleeping sickness, they still don't know. To this day, 2026, we still have no fucking clue. What the fuck? How? Come on. It's no longer widely believed to be related to influenza.

Well, just with those studies alone.

Yeah, it just doesn't seem to connect anymore. And some neurologists believe it may be like an autoimmune response to a virus, while others think that there could be environmental or infectious or viral explanations for it. But others believe that it could be, there could be like multiple causes for the illness.

I wonder if it was like, I wonder if the reason it's so rare now is like it was like some illness, obviously, but it was maybe exacerbated by something that we don't intake anymore.

We don't do anymore. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's what I wonder. I wonder if environmentally there's something that we've shed out of our system or shed out of our way of life that we're no longer being exposed to. I think that would be an interesting thing to go back and look through. Try to work backwards that way.

Because it's like, what would it be? That would affect so many people from so many various age ranges.

And give them so many different symptoms. The difference in symptoms is wild.

It just makes me think of the radium girls case. How they were painting their mouths with radium and then all that crazy shit happened.

That case will blow my mind for the rest of my life.

No, truly. It really will. But you wonder if it's something like that, if it's like, this used to be in our milk or this used to be in- A cleaning product. The air.

Or these people- Or these people take for a cold.

Yeah. Or these people live near these plants that produce this. I wonder.

Like clothing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Hair stuff. It could be anything. Yeah. Some of that. Soap.

But it would have to be so vastly used because so many kids were getting this and elderly people were getting this and everybody in between.

That's the thing. There was no age range either. It's everybody. It's interesting. I feel like it has to be like a... Something you'd use on your body. Yeah. That would be... You would use on a kid. Yeah.

Or like you said, a cleaning product that somebody might have used in their house.

Yeah.

I feel like we should really continue looking into this, though, so that this doesn't happen I guess.

Let's figure this out, guys. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. We can all do this.

I mean, weird things have happened where the Somerton Man case was solved right after we covered it.

So maybe they'll figure it out because we put it into the world.

That'd be weird. I'm putting it into the world right now. That we're going to figure it out. I would love that. That'd be sick. That would be a big fucking claim. That would be. I'm never claiming to solve anything, but I'm just saying it's weird timing.

Because there's a small contingent of people who get so fucking angry when we will claim that. Stay mad. Which makes me want to claim more.

I'm claiming it.

But I'll claim this one.

I would totally claim this one. I'll claim it. Imagine if we were right, too, if they were like, Oh, my God. It was in a cleaning product. Based on the Morvan podcast.

We never thought of this. It was in Clorox. Decades and decades. We never thought of this.

Clorox is like, Don't.

It wasn't me. No, Clorox didn't do it. Clorox is like, Fuck you all. No, it wasn't Clorox.

No, it was not Clorox. I use Clorox to disinfect my entire fucking home.

Clorox, we love you. Come on the pod.

Clorox, come on the pod. You're invited. Oh, man. That's a crazy ass case.

Isn't that crazy? This was just like, every once in a while we like to throw a weird fucking history thing in there, like some weird illness or something just to shake it up a little.

Anything that falls under the morbid umbrella.

Anything that's morbid and bizarre. Yeah. Every once in a while we got to throw a curve ball, and this one just really fascinating. It's fascinating. Dave was fascinated by this. I was fascinated by this.

Because it's just so crazy that we've never figured it out.

That's the thing.

We figured out a lot.

And then it was concurrently running when the Spanish flu was happening, so it got buried What if it was manmade by some chemist?

Maybe. And got out.

Who knows?

Who knows? Who knows? Not me. Not me. Not me. But yeah, if you guys ever want us to cover something that you... Something similar to this that you feel falls under the morbid umbrella, send it in to morbidpodcast@gmail. Com with unconventional morbid idea.

Yeah. Because you know we don't do these often. We mostly do true crime because we know that's what you're here for. But they're really fun to sprinkle in. But every once in a while, it's fun to give you guys a little like, huh, that was weird and interesting.

And we could always throw it like, we have that bonus episode. We could always throw it over there if it's not everybody's thing.

So if you got weird, bizarre history things, science things, medical things that you would just We love to hear a discussion about a deep dive in, throw it our way.

We'd love to do stuff like that. Conventional morbid finds.

Yeah, the more the merrier.

All right, let's find a weird fact to finish this off. I think it's your turn.

The word pothole, it's a redundant term because pot comes from the middle English word pit, meaning hole. So a pothole is a hole hole.

A hole hole? A hole hole. I'm only going to be calling them hole holes right now. God damn will he fill in that hole hole?

God damn. And Massachusetts is full of hole holes.

Hole holes everywhere. Hole holes in your hair. It has all kinds of holes. I like that. That is a fun fact. A hole hole. Got really sexy. And with that- We hope you keep listening. And we hope you- Keep it weird. But that's so weird that you don't keep it real sexy in here. It drives slow over holes and cover your mouth when you avoid them. Avoid them.